Monday, November 30, 2009

Below is quoted from an online release sent out by the UH-Manoa Center for Pacific Islands Studies:

"'Homealani' will be shown Sunday, Dec. 13, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Princess Ruth Keelikolani Auditorium of the Kamehameha Schools Kapalama Campus, sponsored by Ke Alii Pauahi Foundation. Admission is free and there will be a question and answer session following the film.

'Homealani' is a film about filmmaker Ann Marie N Kirk's grandfather Colonel Oliver H Kupan. Kirk, an MA student at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, says, 'It's a very personal film, but I hope people who see it will see the story of my grandfather speaks to many Hawaiians of his time who had to learn how to navigate and find balance living in a both a Hawaiian world and the Western world.'"

The Royal Society, Britain's academy of science, is celebrating its 350th anniversary this year. As one means of marking the event, the society has mounted the Letters to the Royal Society online, via a site called Trailblazing. Among other items of potential interest to Hawaii and Pacific researchers are the letters of Captain James Cook. Researchers should also note that the UH-Manoa library subscribes to multiple databases which provide full-text, online access to publications of the society, particularly the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which began publishing in the 1600s. To find the Transactions (which also include various items authored by Cook, among others), search the phrase "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London" (without quotation marks) in the Library's Electronic Resources portal (the majority of these resources are subscription databases, meaning that users are required to have a valid UH-Manoa ID to access them). To view article on the Society's anniversary and the Trailblazing project, click here to access the online edition of the Guardian UK.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

If you are a currently enrolled student or faculty member at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and are planning to visit a university library outside of Hawaii (or if you are a researcher from abroad planning on visiting our campus), you should know that the UHM Library participates in two reciprocal programs. The Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) Reciprocal Circulation Program allows students and faculty to borrow books from more than a dozen university and college libraries in the continental United States. UH-Manoa faculty members are also eligible for the OCLC Faculty Reciprocal Borrowing Card, which allows access to roughly 200 U.S. research libraries. For more information on these programs (including a list of GWLA reciprocal libraries), click here. For a list of participating OCLC institutions, click here. To make use of these privledges, UHM students and faculty need to contact either Naomi Chow (ILL/ESP Librarian) or Sandra Ohashi (Circulation Manager) in the library's Access Services Department prior to their departure. (Visiting researchers should make arrangements through their own college or university library.)
Visiting researchers should also note that the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections have different circulation policies from the rest of the UH-Manoa Hamilton Library. To view our circulation policies, click here.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Poets Angela T. Hoppe-Cruz (MSW/MA Pacific Islands Studies Candidate) & Kisha Borja-Kicho`cho` (MA Pacific Islands Studies Candidate)will read from their work This Friday, November 20, from 5 - 7 p.m. at Halau o Haumea, Kamakauokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies.Both women are Chamoru and were born and raised on the island of Guam. For more information, click on the flyer at left.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Owing to planned server maintenance, UH-Manoa Library's Voyager catalog will go offline Wednesday, November 25, at 4 p.m. It is currently estimated that the catalog will be unavailable until at least noon on Saturday, November 28. Other of the library's subscription databases may also be unavailable during this time-frame.
If you are planning on requesting materials from the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections' closed shelf holdings--i.e. if you plan on using anything other than our reference materials--between 4 and 5 p.m. on Wednesday the 25th, you will need to do so by filling out a "manual paging slip" and turning it in to our fifth-floor circulation counter. (Paging slips are available at either our circulation counter or H&P reference desk).

Friday, November 13, 2009

The below message comes from Hamilton Library's Interlibrary Loan Department, and includes important information regarding services during the upcoming Winter Interim period (Saturday December 19, 2009 - Sunday January 10, 2010).

Due to the upcoming Winter Interim Closure and reduced staffing related to Library and University budget cuts, please note the following:

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Below is quoted from a press release put out by the UH-Manoa Department of English (for more information, click here):

The Ninth Fall Writers' Festival will bring locally and nationally renowned writers to UH Manoa and Kapi'olani Community College campuses. Three literary genres will be represented: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The festival has brought a wide range of writers to Hawai'i since 1998. Each festival has offered emphases on culture and location with writers from Samoa, Indonesia, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Hawai'i, Canada and the Mainland USA.

Guest authors have strong connections with the communities of Hawai'i, including Kanaka Maoli authors Carlos Andrade, Davianna McGregor, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Lurline McGregor and Ty Kawika Tengan, who have each just published significant first books, and represent a new wave of literary and scholarly publishing by Hawaiians. In addition, distinguished Hawaiian playwright and alumna Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Cades Award for Literature) has published a first novel. The festival theme also alludes to representations that writers make on the page, and also to the groups that they belong to. We hope that this will make for interesting cross-cultural, and cross-genre panel discussions, and author readings, this November 18-20th.

This year we begin our festival with a celebration of the late Ian MacMillan, our widely admired colleague who guided students in the English Department's creative writing program for more than forty years.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Those interested in the impact of climate change on Pacific islands might visit the website of the Isles of Scilly Earth Summit, which is currently featuring a series of short videos made during the October 2009 summit. Presentors include Ursula Rakova (Cartaret Islands, Boungainville Province, Papua New Guinea); Fiu Mataese (Samoa); Dr. John Ewan (Tiri Matangi, Aotearoa/New Zealand); as well as others representing island communities from outside the Pacific. In addition to the videos linked off the homepage, information about the speakers (and in some cases added video content) can be found under the "Earth" tab on the summit homepage.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Until relatively recently, those looking for information in Hawai'i newspapers published before 1929 had limited options. That was the year in which the first indexes for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser were published; for newspapers prior to that, indexing was at best sporadic (and often non-existent), leaving researchers in many cases to pore over issue after issue of microfilmed paper in search of specific information.

The Ho'olapa'i: Hawaiian Nupepa Collection (a joint venture of Alu Like, Inc., Bishop Museum and UH-Hilo's Hale Kuamo'o) now provides unprecedented online access to Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948. Meanwhile, two projects being undertaken by the UH-Manoa Library are aiding in access to the early English-language newspapers (which also began publishing in the 1830s).

The Bob Krauss Index: In 2006 the Hawaiian Collection received the private research index created by the late Bob Krauss, longtime columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser. Krauss' wide-ranging interests were legendary, and his index, though not a complete listing of every article published in every paper, covers nearly thirty 19th- and 20th-century publications, including the Polynesian, the Friend, the Hawaiian Star and the Hilo Daily Tribune. At present, there are more than 44,000 index entries in the online database, with more being added on a near daily basis.

National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP): Launched in 2005, the NDNP ultimately aims to digitize several million newspaper pages published between 1836 and 1922, as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities' We The People initiative. Researchers of Hawaiian history will recognize this date span as among the most critically important in Hawaiian history, encompassing a period of intense political and social change. It was also a period of intense media scrutiny, with the first Hawaiian-language newspaper being published in 1834 and the first English paper in 1836.

Since 2008, Hamilton Library has received two separate grants (totalling nearly $350,000) to participate in the NDNP, in partnership with the Hawai‘i State Public Library System and the Hawai'i State Archives. When these grant projects are completed, some 100,000 pages of early, English-language newspapers from Hawai'i will be freely available online at the Library of Congress' Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website, with every page being full-text searchable.

The Library is currently working to digitize from microfilm the following newspapers: The Independent (May 1, 1895 - June 15, 1895); The Daily Herald (Sept. 1, 1886 - July 30, 1887); The Independent (June 24, 1895 - Oct. 31, 1905); The Hawaiian Gazette (Jan. 21, 1865 - Nov. 29, 1918); and The Honolulu Republican (June 14, 1900 - Jan. 25, 1902). The Library has also received three bound volumes of the Hilo Tribune Herald (Nov. 23, 1895 - June 27, 1917), on loan from the Library of Congress, in order to microfilm and then digitize the issues. These particular volumes are not presently held in complete form anywhere in Hawai'i.

Taken in tandem, the NDNP, Ho'olaupa'i and Krauss Index projects provide an unprecedented level of access into Hawai'i's early newspapers, and could literally help to rewrite history. Last June, the first 12,603 Hawai'i NDNP pages were made publicly accessible. For more information on this project, click here.

Dr. Oliver was also a staunch supporter of the Library's Pacific Collection, and in honor of his life and work, the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections reading room is currently hosting a memorial display, which includes among other items two of several Melanesian masks previously donated by Dr. Oliver. Information for this posting was culled from a biographical sketch previously composed by Dr. Oliver's longtime colleague and friend, Gene Ogan. To read that essay, click here. At the time of his passing, Dr. Oliver was 96 years old.

About Us

The Hawaiian & Pacific Collections are located on the fifth floor of Hamilton Library, on the campus of University of Hawaii-Manoa. For general questions about either collection, contact: hawnpac@hawaii.edu This blog began publishing on Oct. 30, 2009, and is edited by Pacific specialist librarian Stu Dawrs. Contact: dawrs@hawaii.edu